There are plenty of other activities that will occupy your time. Treasure maps will lead you to buried riches or cabins where your family members are being kept. Nine other famous pirates are also at work in the Caribbean. The game directs you to them from time to time and gives you the opportunity to put an end to the pirating careers. Getting married, finding lost cities, escorting governors from place to place and hunting down wanted criminals also provide interesting short and long term goals for you to focus on.

There's a finite limit to your pirating career. In addition to the toll that aging takes on your body, you'll find that your crews don't like serving more than a year or so. Keep them on for much longer than that and they're likely to mutiny. The only answer to dealing with crew unhappiness (besides sacrificing them all in a futile battle, of course) is to divide up the plunder and let them go their separate ways. You'll get your share of the treasure and, after a suitable period for refitting, start all over again with a new ship.

Alas, there are some small problems with the game. I'd like to see options to attack towns included whenever you sail into port. As it is, you can only automatically attack towns when approaching on foot. Short of that, you'll have to fire a few shots at the town first or attack ships of the nation controlling the town before you get the option attack the town from the sea. There are some occasional frustrations with accidentally sailing into a town when you merely wished to put ashore near the town. This is only really a problem if you have to use a city as a starting point for a treasure search.

Since you're engaging in the same four or five activities again and again some gamers may find that the game also has a tendency to become repetitive. This tendency is lessened by the dynamic nature of the world and the various contexts that you can create for yourself while playing. Even so, your 20th duel with the bothersome captain of the guard won't hold any surprises for you. You'll also find that the more mundane encounters become more tiresome once you've obtained the special items that grant bonuses to ship battles, duels and dances. Shoot, shoot, spin, spin, dance, dance -- let's just get on with this, shall we?

And while I realize that the game isn't meant to be 100% historically accurate, I wish the Letter of Marque were a little less generic. Historically the Letters of Marque legitimized piracy against the ships of rival nations but sadly there's no check in the game to keep players from taking Letter of Marque from all nations at once. As a result piracy against the ships of every nations can become nice and legal for a single player. This makes the distinction between pirates and privateers almost non-existent in the game. It would be really great if Letters of Marque required players to turn over a portion of their prizes to the issuing nation. This would definitely make players think twice about enlisting in the service of a given nation and help to counterbalance the massive discounts on repairs and trade goods that privateers can obtain. Captain Kidd's decision to break the terms of his own Letter of Marque reveals the drama that such a distinction might help create.

Though it won't put too much stress on your video card, the new version of Pirates! looks damn good. The world of the Caribbean is really brought to life beautifully here. The colors are all really vibrant and the sandy beaches, dense forests and stony hills merge together very naturally. Cities and settlements dot the coasts and are easily identifiable by the colored flag that flies above them. Puffy white clouds drift through the sky casting shadows on the sea and land. Darker storm clouds pour rain down onto the sea and are punctuated by occasional flashes of lightning.

The animations add a lot of life to the game. The flags flapping in the breeze and the sails billowing as the wind shifts add lots of personality to the otherwise static ships and also serve as a nice visual indicator of the quality and direction of the wind. You'll see the ships listing to either side as the bow dives in and out of the water as you steer your course through the Caribbean.

The water is just great. The small waves keep the sea from looking too flat and the slight variations in ocean color keep things from becoming monotonous. There doesn't really seem to be much variation in the size or quality of the waves (to reflect rough seas, for instance) but the distorted reflection of the ship in the water and the foamy wake trailing behind the ship serve to heighten the realism. Foam or sandy-colored water makes a nice transition between the open sea and the coastal areas and dangerous reefs. Small waves also break on the shores, making the whole experience that much more dynamic.